Settle & Sink
Sections 13 through 16

(stockholm)

His eyelids had grown heavy long ago, but no way was he shutting them now, not when he had barely managed to open them. He was still crying, the light so bright that he could not make out his surroundings, and for a moment he longed for the castle dungeon again, and the knowledge that where he was didn't matter. He missed the dark and the cold, and shut his eyes.

(twist)

Djaq hated Allan for the briefest of breaths, a single nanosecond of absolute loathing, before coming back to herself. She knew Robin- better than any of the men, save perhaps Much, and certainly more than Marian, blinded as the young noblewoman was by love. She had seen him changing, altering irreversibly as the weeks and months slipped by. Saw him move from fighting for England to fighting for Marian to fighting for himself, for the tenuous grip he retained on his morality. He'd cast Allan out in a desperate grab at humanity, latching onto "traitor to me is traitor to England." Misplaced, maltreated, false nationalism, a shadowy reflection of a sentiment that Robin just didn't have anymore. A feeling that had simply been run out of his blood by sleepless nights and constant worry. Allan's fevered body, radiating heat and stretched unmoving near the fire, was a shattered example of what happened when the mistakes Robin tried to hide became all too visible. Mistakes rarely cost this much to anyone else, but Robin was Robin so of course he was different. He survived on his judgment and Allan, with his noble intentions (however they had turned out) had just twisted and warped it beyond Robin's ability to fix. Djaq knew him enough to know that he was a wreck, now more than ever, because Robin was Sherwood and the forest was rotting from the inside out.

(raw)

He feels different, not better, but awake for the first time in months. The pain is there; the lethargy is not, replaced by a need to be heard. He manages to force a sound out of his raw throat, one that is painful and monosyllabic, but it accomplishes what he needed it to; there is movement, and dark eyes appear above his. A hand on his forehead, and a cup of water at his lips.
"I'm sorry." Allan doesn't know how to respond to this, and so he doesn't, swallowing the water instead and realizing how overheated, parched he is in the process.
"Robin?" It's one word, barely audible, but he feels like he'll never be able to speak again.
"Not here." Allan, whose mind has been on only one thing since he awoke, feels relief surge through his chest. He shuts his eyes and the hand leaves his forehead. Will never said much, because he never needed to.

(sand)

Much is well used to Robin assuming that their stories are the same, that Acre was Acre and they were in it together. For the most part, he's right. Days and nights spent together, asleep on thin pallets or exhausted and bloody and fighting, blurred the way that dreams are sometimes, until they stop, freeze, hone in on an image, a moment, a day, that could never quite be forgotten completely. Robin and Much, master and servant, together until Robin suddenly was not, was not together, was scattered and raving and almost too hot to touch, eyes wide open and unseeing, a dead weight in the hospital tent. A single mistake, a misstep, a missed block to an attack that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Years later, Much thinks about how their stories are not the same, are alike but flawed in the one way that could split them forever; an image, a moment, a day or more in the hospital tent. Robin's mistake; his mistake for not being there, not doing something.
Much watches Allan when Djaq and Will are sleeping. Feels his skin, and his fingers meet with hot desert sand and a bloodred sun.